The invention relates to telecommunications networks, and more particularly to advanced architectures for the description of telecommunication services.
The feature-interaction problem arises from the incremental, feature-by-feature, extension of telecommunications system functionality. As new features such as call forwarding, call waiting, or three-way calling have been added to telecommunication systems, it has become increasingly difficult to manage the behavioral complexity of the features and their interactions. Redesign of old features to fit smoothly with the new features is scarcely ever a practical option. Eventually, the resulting complexity damages the quality and productivity of all phases of telecommunication software development.
In the pending utility application, “Telecommunication System and Method,” Ser. No. 09/034,681, filed on Mar. 4, 1998, which is incorporated by reference herein, the inventors introduced an architecture for managing the feature-interaction problem. The inventors presented a virtual architecture for telecommunication systems, which they called distributed feature composition (DFC), in which a feature corresponds to a component type; each telephone call is handled by building a configuration of instances of these components, according to the features to be applied to that particular call. The feature component instances communicate by featureless internal calls that are connected by the underlying architectural substrate. A new feature is specified by describing its corresponding component type (or occasionally, two component types) and the rules for including the component instances into configurations. In the pending utility applications, “Routing Extensions For Telecommunications Network System And Method,” Ser. No. 09/644,128, filed Aug. 23, 2000, and “Protocol Extensions For Telecommunications Network Systems and Method,” Ser. No. 09/644,461, filed Aug. 23, 2000, “Signaling/Media Separation for Telecommunication Network System and Method,” Ser. No. 09/716,102, filed on Nov. 17, 2000, which are incorporated by reference herein, the inventors enhanced and modified DFC to accommodate open telecommunication systems, mobile telecommunication users, multimedia telecommunication services, unified messaging, and other aspects of modern telecommunication systems and services.
As discussed in the above-mentioned pending applications, DFC “address data” is data in the distributd feature system associated directly with individual addresses. The location of this data is an important problem, for several reasons. Its size is directly proportional to the number of addresses in use, which means that a successful DFC-like network will have a large quantity of DFC address data to manage. DFC address data is used frequently by routers and feature boxes in the above schemes, so access to it should be quick. Finally, DFC address data is data that describes or belongs to customers, and is therefore subject to many concerns about security, privacy, and protection behind administrative boundaries.